Takeaway Points:

Feeling good in our bodies is often wrongly conflated with “looking good to other people.” Many people start working out because they want to change how they look, but there is a genetic limit to what we can change about our bodies.
Finding something at the gym that makes it fun and rewarding to do the actual work of working out is much more rewarding and often leads to feeling good even if there aren’t big visual changes to the body.
Being able to track improvement over time is key to being successful at the gym, so focus on things that can be tracked like strength or endurance related goals.

(This is an updated version of an article originally published on 8/31/15. It has been updated to improve the writing style, and to bring it in line with current formatting standards.)

Almost everyone comes into the gym because they want to look better.

As a personal trainer, the vast majority of clients that came into the gym looking for training, wanted to look better. The most common gymgoer interested in training, wants to look better and lose weight; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Less commonly, I would get others: a sprinkling of athletes (weekend warriors and youth more likely than professional), the occasional elderly client looking to maintain function, and every now and then someone looking to bulk up, gain muscle or strength, or with some vague health ideal in mind.

I think that there’s something about that that fundamentally doesn’t work out.

Not everyone has the genetics to look perfectly amazing from working out. Genetics may not prevent you from making progress, but they’re the single largest factor that determine the results that you ultimately get. Accordingly, some people will be able to easily achieve their goals, some may find it takes a lot more time, some may find it functionally impossible, all depending on how realistic your goals are.

You can always be better than you were the day before, even if you can’t be as good as some other person. Don’t judge yourself based on others. Judge yourself only based on your own progress.

Many people think they want to look more athletic, but I think a lot of them would be happier if they just felt better in their existing bodies.

Do you really need to lose weight and get lean in order to feel comfortable? Or would you rather take it a little bit easier, enjoy yourself a little more, and have fun while adding strength, size, and endurance? When you’re stronger and more durable, you feel better, have higher energy levels, and are much more capable of handling daily tasks that come to you. That’s incredibly empowering, and I can speak from firsthand experience as a former skinny weakling.

Ultimately, I think the gym would be a much better and healthier place if people exercised not just to look better, but to feel better. Sometimes the two are the same, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But many other times, I think it would be just as great if we could all just try to be stronger versions of ourselves. The funniest thing is that when we do that, stuff like “looking better” tends to follow anyway.

The metrics of progress for stuff like strength and endurance are generally much more visible than those for looking good: you can lose weight but also lose muscle, or you can gain weight and muscle and still look leaner than you did when you were at the original weight. Meanwhile, we can have very specific and meaningful numbers about how much we can, say, bench press. Tracking consistent progress in performance goals means you keep seeing more and more results, and that means that provided that you’re progressing properly, you’re going to see changes in physique as well.

One of my absolute favorite clients originally came to me because he wanted to lose weight. But then he realized that this wasn’t really feasible for him - his limitations were that he couldn’t afford a ton of weekly training sessions (just twice a week), he couldn’t really motivate himself to work out aside from our sessions, and he didn’t really want to change his dietary habits too much. So, we tried a lot of stuff, but ultimately he accepted that none of it would work.

From that point, we decided to focus on the things that we COULD control - namely, the two training sessions per week. In that limited time, I knew that I couldn’t get him to build a ton of muscle or become an Olympic athlete, but I could get him stronger, because strength training requires less overall time spent training than other qualities.

So, I put him on a very basic strength program - and he fell in love with it.

Before long, he had doubled his deadlift, and started getting excited to come into the gym. From there, he adjusted his habits further to sustain this pursuit - and got a lot healthier overall - all because we decided NOT to focus on physique-related goals.

I think a lot of people should take a similar approach. Try focusing on something that you enjoy being good at in the gym, and do that - instead of focusing only on appearances.

About Adam Fisher

Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging and coaching since 2012, and lifting since 2006. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.

During that time he has coached thousands of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around bodybuilding and powerlifting, in which he’s competed.

Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cats or feeding his video game addiction.

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What You Look Like Shouldn’t Matter

Takeaway Points:

About Adam Fisher

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Further Reading:

What You Look Like Shouldn’t Matter

Takeaway Points:

About Adam Fisher

Enjoy this post? Share the gains!

Further Reading:

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